Building the Education Revolution

02/06/11

Thousands of Building the Education Revolution projects still remain to be completed, months after the original deadlines have passed and more than three years after the Global Financial Crisis, according to Senator Brett Mason, Shadow Minister for Universities and Research.

“Of 10,697 projects under the BER’s Primary Schools for the 21^st Century (P21) program, 2022 still remain to be completed,” said Senator Mason.

“That's around 20 per cent of P21 projects that still haven’t been completed! This includes:

·         147 projects which were supposed to have been completed by 20 December 2010;

·         762 which were supposed to have been completed by 31 January 2011; and

·         1,117 which were supposed to have been completed by 31 March 2011.

“4,680 time extensions have been given so far to P21 projects by the Government, making a mockery of the concept of sticking to timelines and deadlines, particularly in the context of a ‘timely’ stimulus.  This means that nearly half of all the P21 projects have had problems meeting the deadlines.

“The Science and Languages Centres for the 21^st Century (SLC) component of the BER is even more farcical – with most if not all projects having been allowed to at least once ignore their original completion deadline of 30 June 2010.  Of the 698 applications for time extension that were received for SLC, 630 were approved out of a program which involves only 537 projects.

“Almost a year after the deadline, 67 SLC projects have still not been completed.

“In the past, the Minister and the Department have offered a whole lot of excuses for the appalling delays on SLC projects: floods, bushfires, and ‘unseasonably wet weather’.  But if weather variations seem to have affected all the SLC projects around the country, shouldn’t they have also affected all the P21 projects as well?  There is clearly something particularly wrong with the SLC program.”

Senator Mason has been told at the Senate Budget Estimates Committee hearings today that $2 billion out of $14.1 billion of the P21 program still remains to be spent.

“We are now nearly in the 2011/12 financial year, years after the Global Financial Crisis, and years after the commencement of the BER program, yet hundreds of millions of dollars still continue to be rolling out of the Government coffers and will continue to do so well into the foreseeable future,” said Senator Mason.

“So much for the stimulus being ‘timely’.  The way the Labor Government is taking time in spending the stimulus money it will get us through to the next recession, which will be caused by this Government’s appalling financial mismanagement and its death wish for the Australian economy.

“Sadly, the farce that is the BER implementation drags on and on, with no end in sight.”